


Life's A Party When I'm With You

by Jade_Sabre



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: And Other Sundry Stuff, Citadel Redux, F/M, Fondue, Gen, Gift Fic, Mass Effect 3: Citadel, baby krogan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 17:29:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17605742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jade_Sabre/pseuds/Jade_Sabre
Summary: Fresh off their honeymoon, Kaidan and Shepard decide to throw a housewarming party.  Hijinks ensue.  A 2018/9 Mass Effect Holiday Cheer Fic forratonnhhaketon.





	Life's A Party When I'm With You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ratonnhhaketon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ratonnhhaketon/gifts).



> Happy Holiday Cheer! I hope you find this fic to be full of many of your favorite things, and maybe a few surprises along the way.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to the incomparable [Quarkaroo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/loquaciousquark) for betaing. And laughing at my terrible jokes.

Looking at it later, when he wasn’t standing in the middle of the wreckage of what had been his living room, he would say that it had been a pretty great party.  
  
It had all the makings of a great party, after all.  He and Shepard together, check.  He and Shepard back from their honeymoon, ready to see all their friends, check.  He and Shepard and their awesome new apartment, check.  
  
“It’s…exactly like the old one,” Shepard said as he held the door open and ushered her in.  
  
“Not exactly,” he said.  “I changed some of the décor.  Bought a new bed.”  
  
She lifted an eyebrow but didn’t say anything as she continued scanning the room.  On the one hand, of _course_ the bed was new; on the other, he’d wanted to eliminate any confusion on the subject, as once in the old apartment Shepard had stopped kissing him in the middle of a _moment_ to say, “Oh my God, this is _Anderson’s_ bed,” thus killing the moment entirely and preventing the start of a few more until the new mattress and sheets arrived.    
  
This time, all moments would be seen through to their proper conclusion.  “Oh,” he added, as he came back from his reverie, “and I made some defensive modifications.”  
  
She stopped three steps in and side-eyed the glass wall on her right.  “Did you talk to Garrus about them?”  
  
“Maybe,” he said cheerfully.  
  
“…can I actually get in the hot tub?” she asked.  
  
He stepped up behind her, slipped his arms around her waist, and whispered in her ear, “Only one way to find out.”  
  
(As it turned out, she could.)  
  
The rebuilt Citadel still had some supply issues, what with several of the mass relays still being dark, and Liara was too busy reconnecting her network to let them borrow Glyph, so they were on their own for party supplies.  “It feels cheap to say ‘bring your own beer’ on the invitations,” Shepard said, leaning over the counter, tapping her chin.  
  
“But if we say it, then we’ll know they’ll do it,” he said, standing in front of the open fridge and contemplating their underwhelming alcohol supplies.  
  
“Yeah, but they’ll do it anyway,” she said.  “Garrus doesn’t trust my tastes and Tali’s are too refined for him, and Joker gets grouchy if there’s no good cheap beer, and Grunt’ll never admit it out loud, but he’s picky about his ryncol.  I always end up with more than I started with.  I’m more worried about the food.”  
  
“What’s to worry about?” he said, though he was also staring at their food supplies, which amounted to various shapes and sizes of takeout containers.  
  
“Last time, EDI ended up making curry at two in the morning,” Shepard said.  “ _Curry_.”  
  
“I like curry,” he said.  
  
“But it’s not party food,” she said, “and it was two in the morning, and the whole kitchen still smelled when everyone woke up and I’m not having the hangovers puking on the rugs because some AI with no sense of smell gets it in her head that she needs to feed the organics.”  
  
He tilted his head, squinting up at the ceiling.  “ _Does_ EDI have a sense of smell?”  
  
“I was thinking fondue,” Shepard said, driving a Mako across the rails of his train of thought.  
  
“Fondue?” he said, closing the fridge and looking at her.  “Like…chocolate?”  
  
“And cheese,” she said, and to his surprise she looked entirely serious.  “And, like, bread and ham and stuff.  And strawberries too, I guess, if you want to do the chocolate.  But, like, that’s party food, right?”  
  
He thought about asking what would happen when Tali got drunk enough to stick a straw in the wrong kind of fondue, or when the krogans weaponized the fondue forks, but something about Shepard’s expression told him that she’d given this a lot of thought and decided that fondue was the party food _par excellence_ and any arguments to the contrary would just burst her bubble.  Which was strange, given how practical she normally was about non-military matters (and military ones too, come to think of it)— _too_ practical, really, which was why she had him around, not that he was much better.  But fondue?  _Really_?  
  
“Can we have bacon, too?” he asked instead, and she smirked and kissed him, so he took that as a yes.  
  
She was still kissing him when he was trying to place the order for fondue and bacon, which resulted in him ordering _a lot_ of fondue and bacon and maybe a few other things, but by the time he was hitting “yes” on the confirmation screen he really couldn’t see the screen at all and also really didn’t care that he couldn’t see the screen and it would probably be fine.  
  
“Music,” Shepard said, much later, as she got out of bed and headed for the shower.  “We need a plan for the music.”  
  
He adjusted his head on one of their brand-new, luxuriously comfortable pillows, closed his eyes, and said, “Won’t Tali take care of that?”  
  
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” she called back over the sound of running water.  “You got any old playlists or anything lying around?”  
  
“No?” he said.  “Migraines, remember?”  
  
“Right,” she said, and he opened one eye to see her poking her head around the bathroom doorframe.  “How are those, by the way?”  
  
“Not so bad, so long as I exercise my biotics,” he said, closing his eye again.  
  
“Great,” she said.  “So I’ll leave the music up to you.”  
  
“That’s really not—” but the sound of the water got even louder, and soon Shepard’s off-key humming echoing off the tile filled the room.  If she was trying to make a point about her lack of musical aptitude, well, point made, but that didn’t somehow make him better with music.  Oh well.  He’d ask…someone…for help.  Tali was out, Liara was probably too busy, Garrus only listened to soulful ballads or the turian equivalent of thrasher metal, Joker was—no, Joker would just bust out hanar meditation scripts to troll them all.  Maybe Miranda?  If she could even come?  Or that Jacob guy, he’d seemed pretty normal.  Eh.  It’d be fine.  
  
The day of the party also started out fine— _better_ than fine; this whole waking up every morning next to his _wife_ without any worries about the end of the galaxy thing was making him soft, and he loved every minute of it—at least until the fondue pots arrived.  
  
“Is this seriously what we ordered?” Shepard asked, standing in the middle of their front doorway, staring at the object in her hand.  
  
He came downstairs, pulling his shirt over his head, and said, “I—yeah?  Maybe?  What’s—oh,” he said.  
  
“It’s a _teacup_ ,” she said.  
  
“It’s not that small,” he said, somewhat defensively.  
  
“A _pyjak_ couldn’t use this for fondue, and we have _eight_ of them,” she said, picking up a box from where it had apparently fallen to the ground in her shock and stuffing the offending fondue pot back into it.  She tossed the box over her shoulder, where it landed perfectly atop the pile of boxes, and opened her omni-tool.  “Can you get the cheese in the fridge while I fix this?”  
  
“Of course,” he said, sliding a hand across her waist as he stepped past her to inspect the pile of boxes beyond.  He easily identified the eight fondue pots, as their boxes were—well—okay, not _teacup_ -sized—look, he’d been distracted, all right—but the fact that the rest of the boxes were easily ten times their size was also a bit…alarming.  He glanced back at Shepard, who was typing furiously on her omni-tool and muttering under her breath, and so he risked placing two hands on her shoulders and steering her to one of the chairs in the living room that faced away from the kitchen.  She didn’t protest as she sank into its plushy depths, just redoubled her typing, and so he felt relatively safe using his biotics to move all of the eight remaining boxes into the kitchen at once, nestling them safely out of sight behind the counter.  
  
He crouched down next to the largest one, read the label, and, wincing, touched his finger to the DNA-sensitive lock.  In moments the box had melted away and he was confronted with an entire wheel of genuine Earth-made Parmesan.  An entire twenty-five pound wheel of genuine Earth-made Parmesan.  A quick glance at a box of similar size informed him that he was in fact now the proud owner of _two_ such wheels.  At least the third box appeared to contain an asari cheese meant for fondue-esque applications, and the fourth and fifth were dextro-friendly; the sixth was apparently a five-pound box of assorted infused truffles, but he could probably melt those down, it’d be fine; and the seventh was…twenty-five pounds of bacon, right, seemed reasonable.  
  
The eighth box was apparently a set of six chia pets, each shaped like one of Blasto’s female companions from the first six films.  
  
“How’s it going?” Shepard’s voice came from somewhere above him.  
  
He nearly banged his head on the counter in his rush to stand up.  “Fine!  Fine,” he said, going for a suave lean on the counter to obscure what hid beneath it as he flashed her his cheesiest grin.  “Quick question.”  
  
“Fire away,” she said.  
  
“Did we remember to order stuff to dip _in_ the fondue?”  
  
He kept grinning as she studied him, and then she sighed and said, “I’ll pick it up when I go grab the new fondue pots.”  
  
“Great!” he said.  “When were you planning on doing that?”  
  
She looked at him for a long minute, lifting an eyebrow as if she wanted to say something—and then she shook her head and said, “I don’t want to know, do I?”  
  
“Trust me,” he said, and she shook her head again before lifting it just enough to meet his gaze.  A wistful smile crossed her face, one that bypassed all his attempts at bravado and hit him right in the heart, a painful, breathless shadow of old wounds barely healed.  
  
“I love you,” she said, in a fond, resigned sort of way, and he was already leaning across the counter to kiss her, suddenly desperate for the contact.  She kissed him back, equally hungry, his hands on her cheeks and hers on his neck, pulling into each other despite the counter between them, though if he kept leaning like this he was probably going to strain something.  But it was worth it.  Always was.  
  
When they broke apart he rested her forehead against hers for a moment, then kissed it and said, “Take your time.”  
  
“That bad?” she asked.  
  
“Trust me,” he said again, and she half-laughed, but the concern in her eyes was real.  He made a shooing motion with his hand and she backed away, holding her hands up in the universal sign for unarmed, before turning her back on him and heading out of the apartment.  
  
Once he heard the door close behind her, he slid back down to the floor and stared at his new collection of assorted cheeses for a long minute before standing and heading for the comm console.  He scrolled through the guest list several times, thinking, before he finally sighed and, giving into the inevitable, placed the call.  
  
A deeply, rumbling bass voice picked up.  “Kaidan.”  
  
“Wrex,” he said.  “You and Bakara coming tonight?”  
  
“’Fraid she won’t be making it,” Wrex said.  “Has to go sit on the clutch.  You know how it is.  Or maybe you don’t.  But you will,” he said, with an unsettling _heh heh heh_.  
  
“But you’re coming?” he said, shoving aside the butterflies that always arose in his stomach at the prospect of—well, _that_.  
  
“To Shepard’s party?  Hell yeah,” he said.  “Why, need me to bring something?  Too cheap to buy your own beer?”  
  
“It’s not that,” he said.  “Can I borrow your warhammer?”  
  
He waited through the long pause on the other end of the line, forcing himself to keep all explanations at bay, and was rewarded by a much more unsettling laugh than the first.  “I’m in, Alenko,” he said.  “Be there in five.”  
  
The krogan hung up before he could ask him where he was that he’d be there so soon, but really, he was probably better off not knowing.  
  
The console dinged—ah, Jacob had sent over the playlist, excellent.  He fed it to the apartment’s VI, marked it off his mental checklist, and went to double-check that he hadn’t accidentally outfitted the apartment with anything breakable.  Well.  Breakable under normal circumstances.  Everything became breakable when krogan entered the room.  
  
The proximity alarm chimed while he was meticulously arranging throw pillows on the upstairs guest bed, and then the doorbell rang while he was heading for the stairs, and then the intruder siren started going off as Wrex apparently forced the door open and barged into the apartment, and then as he came down the stairs he looked up just in time to see the glass wall by the door shatter into a million pieces, some of which feebly lodged themselves in Wrex’s head plates, the rest of which mostly piled up by his feet.  
  
“Neat trick,” Wrex greeted him, picking a shard of glass from the skin by his eye.  The skin didn’t even deign to pretend to be remotely injured.  
  
He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the shards.  “That was not nearly as effective as Garrus made it sound.”  
  
“Well, you just broke the glass,” Wrex said.  “You gotta make sure it shoots _out_ , not just falls apart like that.  How pissed is Shepard gonna be?”  
  
“That’s what the vacuum VI is for,” he said, and in short order a small, round, white robot about the size of a dinner plate appeared from a slot in the wall and approached the jagged remains of the glass wall.  After a few feeble attempts at the perimeter of the mess, it gave a sad, warbly beep and retreated to its docking station.  
  
“You’re screwed,” Wrex commented, and then he reached behind his back and pulled out a warhammer, its handle nearly as thick as a human arm, its head a hodgepodge of sharp edges and blunt trauma waiting to happen.  He held it out and said, “You needed this?”  
  
“I don’t have fancy cybernetics,” Kaidan said, refusing to take it.  “I just have a twenty-five pound block of cheese I need destroyed.”  
  
“A what now?” Wrex said, following him to the kitchen.  
  
“The lady of the house wants fondue,” he said, rolling the first wheel to the relative safety of the space between the kitchen and the dining room table.  “This is not going to fit in a fondue pot.”

 

“Let me get this straight,” Wrex said stepping into his space and looming over him with narrowed eyes.  “You called me away from my afternoon nap to smash some _cheese_?”  
  
There’d been a time where he might’ve been intimidated, but that was years and several hundred Reapers ago.  “That’s right,” he said, standing his ground, crossing his arms, lifting his chin and meeting the krogan’s gaze.  
  
Wrex stared him down for a particularly long minute, and then his wide mouth split his face in a toothy grin.  “Bring it on.”  
  
He thought it better to leave Wrex to his own devices, and furthermore he still had to address the problem of the shattered glass in the entry.  Doing his best to ignore the gleeful war cries from the kitchen, he set about reprogramming the vacuum VI until he had a veritable army of tiny robots jostling around the entry, crunching glass into dust and sucking it away.  He surveyed their efforts from the couch with a beer in hand and thought that for the first time he kind of understood what had motivated the quarians to invent the geth.  Imagine what all those little robots could do if only they networked their core processors—  
  
“Hey,” Wrex said, appearing at his elbow—and man, he must’ve been daydreaming pretty hard to miss his approach—“mission accomplished.  Got anything else you need smashed?”  
  
 “That was it,” he said.  “Is it, uh—”  
  
“I found some boxes to put it in,” Wrex said.  “What, you don’t trust me to clean up after myself?”  
  
“I mean, not really,” he said.  
  
“It’s ‘cause I’m a krogan, isn’t it,” Wrex said.  
  
He raised his eyes to the ceiling, mentally bracing himself for a broken jaw.  “I mean, yeah, pretty much.”  
  
“Heh,” Wrex said, “that’s fair.  I’m gonna go take my nap now.”  
  
“O—kay,” he said, ending on a resigned note as the krogan gleefully stomped up the stairs.  He waited a few more minutes, was rewarded by a cry of _why are there so many damn pillows on this bed?_ and made his way to the kitchen, where it turned out all the cheeses had been smashed into meltable bits before being placed in meticulously labeled boxes…and pots…and repurposed take-out containers whose contents now appeared to be in the trash…but hey, it was done, and so he turned his attention to the other main course.  
  
“Mm,” came Shepard’s voice, maybe half an hour later, and after a moment his wife came into view laden with a trolley full of fondue pots.  “I know that smell.”  
  
“Damn straight,” he replied, mostly distracted by the four skillets he had going at one time.  He watched the grease spatter into the air and it occurred to him that lids would maybe be helpful in staving off the inevitable grease fire coming his way.  
  
“That’s—wow,” she said, apparently noticing the six plates piled high with bacon on the dining room table.  “That’s—wait, there’s _more_?”  
  
“What can I say?” he said, flipping a few slices that were definitely on their way to burnt but hey, some people liked it that way.  “I like my bacon.”  
  
“I mean, so do I, but—is that—” He glanced up long enough to see her noticing the various containers of cheese, her mouth slightly ajar.  
  
“Hm?” he said.  
  
“Is that _all_ cheese?”  
  
“You said you wanted fondue,” he said, fumbling a few more slices of bacon onto a paper-lined plate to drain.  “I wanted to be sure we had fondue.”  
  
“All…right,” she said.  “Thank…you?”  
  
“You’re welcome,” he said, stepping away from the stove long enough to give her a kiss on the cheek.  “Also there’s a krogan upstairs.  Everything’s fine.”  
  
“I…trust you,” she said, in dubious tones that suggested she was rethinking that decision.  “Just…keep it up with the bacon.  I’m going to go see if we have enough outlets for all these pots.  Since apparently we’re going to need…all of them.”  
  
“Fondue in every room!” he said cheerfully, and he heard an exasperated sigh and felt a kiss on his cheek, and then she was off, leaving him to his bacon and beer in peace.  
  
The rest of the set-up went relatively smoothly, aside from the moment when Wrex woke up and wandered out with all of the offending pillows which he then proceeded to throw off the balcony and take potshots at with a collection of throwing knives that he apparently just…had with him.  The army of vacuum robots was more than happy to consume all the stuffing, and while Shepard raised an eye at the sheer number that emerged for the fluffy remains, she apparently didn’t think it odd enough to be worth commenting upon.  But soon enough there were fondue pots bubbling in every room with an assortment of meats and breads and—  
  
“What’s this?” Wrex asked, picking up a fondue fork.  
  
“ _Not a toy_ ,” Shepard said.  
  
—beside them, and one fountain tucked away upstairs overflowing with chocolate and accompanied by various fruits and cookies.  Jacob’s playlist turned out to be entirely smooth jazz from various cultures, providing a light but not distracting undercurrent of music that lent a distinguished air to the apartment.  It felt good.  It felt right.  
  
Then the first guest arrived.  
  
“Jack!” Shepard said.  “And—Eezo?”  
  
“Yeah,” Jack said as the varren bounded into the apartment, nearly knocking Shepard over as he greeted her.  “Ever since the battle for Earth he’s had separation anxiety.  Gotta bring him everywhere.  Sorry I forgot to mention it.”  
  
“No—problem,” Shepard said, scratching it behind what passed for its ears and shooting him a desperate look.  
  
“Figured I’d just take him upstairs,” Jack said.  “He loves the hot tub.”  
  
“Great!” he said, “that’ll be—”  
  
“Just don’t lock him in,” she continued, clucking her tongue and heading for the stairs.  Once she got a good twenty feet from him, she clucked again and suddenly the varren _charged_ , knocking Shepard back again as his biotics launched him into Jack.  “ _Good_ boy.  He gets anxious,” she yelled over her shoulder as they disappeared into Shepard and Kaidan’s room.  
  
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said, which wasn’t entirely true, but when he looked back at Shepard she was sitting on the floor staring at the plants by the door.  
  
“Didn’t there used to be a…wall…here?” she asked.  “A glass wall?”  
  
He shrugged.  “Maybe.  Oh, Liara’s asking to be buzzed up.”  
  
Shepard squinted at the plants and finally got to her feet as the door opened and Liara stepped inside followed by Glyph, who had added a pointy party hat floating at a jaunty angle to his festive bowtie.  “Hello, Shepard,” she said.  “Kaidan.  Was your honeymoon nice?”  
  
“It was fantastic,” Shepard said, “and there _definitely_ was a wall here, Kaidan, what happened?”  
  
“Shepard,” Glyph said, “if you would like, I would happily take over monitoring your apartment’s VI for the duration of the party.”  
  
“Sure,” Shepard said.  “Just make sure the fondue pots don’t get so hot they splatter.”  
  
“Fondue?” Liara asked.  
  
“Right this way,” Shepard said, taking her arm and shooting Kaidan a look over her shoulder that indicated she had not forgotten about the glass wall.  He grinned at her in response before returning his attention to the security camera.   
  
Everyone arrived in more-or-less uniform fashion.  Joker and EDI were next, the latter carrying a keg for the former, and then James showed up with one on either shoulder and asking about the pull-up bar.  Garrus came with Tali and Kal’Reegar, apparently fresh off a run for dextro-friendly food and drinks—  
  
“I made sure we had the right kind of cheese,” Kaidan protested.  
  
“Yeah, but Shepard messaged me that she forgot the right kind of meat,” Garrus said.  
  
“And your taste in booze is lousy,” Tali said.  “No offense.”  
  
Kaidan looked at Kal.  “Pregaming?”  
  
Kal shrugged.  “Can neither confirm nor deny that, sir,” he said.  His presence at the party may have been a surprise, but parties at Shepard’s apartment were all about happy endings and Tali was perfectly entitled to one, same as everyone else.  
  
Samantha came in at the same time as Zaeed, though she looked a bit leery of him, possibly due to the number of grenades Kaidan had to confiscate from his person before he was allowed entry.  Steve and Samara rode the elevator together and emerged into the apartment deep in conversation about various meditation techniques.  Chakwas came next, bearing brandy and, in addition to her immaculately tailored suit, a little red feathered fascinator in her hair.  
  
“For the Commander,” she said, offering Kaidan the bottle, “though perhaps if you ask nicely she’ll share.”  
  
“Thanks, Doc,” he said.  “Nice hat.”  
  
“Do you think so?” she asked, giving it a little pat.   
  
“Absolutely,” he said.  “I mean, maybe a bit daring for this crowd, but it looks good.”  
  
She beamed at him, said, “Why, thank you, Major,” and then stood on her tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his cheek.  
  
He stood in shock, blinking, as she took the bottle from his unresisting hands and sauntered past him, calling Shepard’s name.  He stood in shock, blinking, for a very long time, and he only came out of it when Miranda waved a hand in front of his face and said, “Hello?”  
  
“Hello!” he said.  “Sorry.  Welcome.”  
  
“Glad to be back,” she said.  “Couldn’t’ve gotten a little more creative with the layout, could you?”  
  
“I _like_ this layout,” he said.  
  
“It’s not very efficient,” she said, and, well, she had a point, now that he thought about it—“Sorry,” she went on, “I did bring you—”  She stopped, looking at her empty hands, and then checking the empty bag at her shoulder, and the empty space surrounding her, and sighed.  “If Kasumi tries to give you a vase, it’s from me.”  
  
“I…haven’t seen her,” Kaidan said, though of course that meant absolutely nothing.  “But thanks.  Get yourself some fondue.”  
  
“Fondue?” she asked, but she was already moving past him.   
  
That was just about everyone—he had a message from Jacob, something about problems with the babysitter, and no one had ever accused Grunt of being punctual.  He was just turning his back, thinking of parmesan on bacon, when the security alarm went off again, and he opened the door to see Grunt, flanked by two very short, very squat…baby…krogan?  
  
“Hey,” Grunt said.  
  
“Hey?” he said, pinging Shepard on his omni-tool before crouching to take a look at the krogan.  Kids, maybe, not babies, but very short, their mouths comically huge, their head plates more scaly nubs than anything else, their bodies squat and surprisingly squishy-looking underneath their unarmored jumpsuits.  “Hi,” he said to the one on the right, whose plates were blue.  
  
“Krogan forever!” came the high-pitched yet gravely response.  
  
“Be polite,” Grunt said.  “Hey.  So.  Wrex is letting me see one of the fertile females.”  
  
“Generous of him,” Kaidan said.  
  
“Right,” Grunt said.  “Thing is, she’s already got a couple of kids, right, and anyway it’s her first trip to the Citadel and she wanted to see the sights, long day, didn’t feel up to coming to the party, hard to rest in a hotel when you’ve got kids running around…”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Kaidan said.  The one on the left, whose plates were a dark grey, stuck a finger up its nose.  “I don’t…know if this is the best place…”  
  
“Grunt!” came Shepard’s delighted voice from somewhere over his head.  “How’ve you been, you—whoa.”  
  
“Yeah,” Kaidan said.  
  
“Clan Urdnot!” said the one with grey plates.  
  
“I’m an honorary member, you know,” she said.  “Grunt, why do you have kids with you?”  
  
“He’s babysitting,” Kaidan said.  “But I really don’t think—”  
  
“They’ll be fine,” Grunt said.  “Just stick ‘em upstairs, give ‘em a vid, they’ll be fine.  Won’t you, kids?”  He gave one of them a little kick.  
  
“All hail Commander Shepard!” it said.  Grunt gave the krogan equivalent of a hopeful grin, possibly the most unsettling thing Kaidan had ever seen.   
  
And he’d seen a _lot_.  
  
Shepard sighed.  “What are their names?”  
  
“Thanks, Shepard,” Grunt said.  
  
“I didn’t say okay,” she countered.  
  
“Blue one’s Jarkat—say hello, Jarkat,” and the child waved a stubby hand, “and grey one’s Deg.  Say hi, Deg.”  
  
“Hi, Deg,” it said promptly.  
  
“A jokester,” Shepard commented.  “Great.  They can hang out in the gym.”  
  
“We have a gym?” Kaidan asked.  
  
“Well,” Shepard said, “it’s more like the spare bedroom down the hall where I stashed all the gym equipment, planning to set it up when we got back, but haven’t done it yet.  Hey,” she said to Grunt, “you think you can set it up?”  
  
“Can they stay?” he asked.  
  
“Sure,” she said.  
  
“All right, worms,” he said, placing a hand on either child’s head, “you heard the Commander.  Let’s get to work.”  And with that, he lifted them off the ground by their heads and carried them down the hall.  
  
Kaidan and Shepard stood in the doorway and watched.  “Is that how you’re supposed to—”  
  
“I hear krogan children are very durable,” Shepard said.  “Alternatively, this is why the females have never let the males raise them.  Anyway, have you had any fondue?”  
  
“No,” he said, allowing her to take his hand and lead him to the kitchen, where Miranda, Samara, and EDI were congregated around one of the fondue pots.  
  
Everything was fine.  Everything was great.  He and Shepard leaned against each other and chatted with the others; people floated in and out of the various rooms; Parmesan didn’t make for the best fondue but man, it was still delicious, and—  
  
A bloodcurling scream came from the bar.  Kaidan dropped his plate to the floor, running in tandem with Shepard around the corner just as several shots were fired, skidding to a halt when she suddenly dropped behind the couch yelling, “What did I say about live ammo, Zaeed?”  
  
“It’s necessary, Shepard!” he yelled back.  Kaidan crouched next to her and looked up.  Zaeed stood atop the bar, arms extended down and both hands on his pistol as he aimed it at the ground.  Samantha, meanwhile, had her arms around his neck and was attempting to climb onto his shoulders.  Joker had backed into the corner of the bar by the wall, and he could barely make out Steve’s hands poking over the top of the bar, vigorously shaking a drink of some sort.  
  
“Somehow I doubt that!” she yelled back as he fired a few more rounds.  “That’s my floor!”  
  
“It’s crawling with— _things_!” Samantha wailed.  
  
“You’re throwing off my aim!”  
  
Glyph suddenly swooped over Shepard’s shoulder.  “Shepard,” he said, “I believe I can mitigate this situation, if you so desire.”  
  
“Yes, Glyph,” Shepard said through clenched teeth.  “Yes, I do desire it.”  
  
“Excellent,” Glyph said, rising above the couch and floating towards the middle of the room.  Zaeed fired another three rounds.  “Pardon me, Mr. Massani, but I am afraid that I am impervious to the particular sort of—”  
  
“Hold fire!” Shepard called.  “Better yet, put the gun away entirely.”  
  
“Nah,” Zaeed said, and they poked their heads over the couch to see him balancing Samantha on his shoulders, gripping her leg with one hand while waving the pistol with the other.  The floor before the bar was riddled with splintered wood and what appeared to be the remains of several small, round, white robots.  “Little buggers might come back.”  
  
“Little _what_?” Shepard said, as Kaidan’s stomach sank.  
  
“These—little round— _things_ ,” Samantha said, waving her arms with little care for maintaining her balance.  Zaeed gritted his teeth as he braced himself on the bar.  “I swear, all I did was drip a little fondue on the floor and went, ‘oh, better clean that up!’ and suddenly they were _everywhere_ —”  
  
“Shepard,” Glyph said, “I believe Specialist Traynor is referring to your personalized home vacuum VI and integrated robot system.”  
  
“My what now?” Shepard asked, as Kaidan slid ever so subtly away from her, only to run into Miranda, who was standing at the end of the couch with her arms crossed.  Most of the other guests had apparently also come to enjoy the proceedings; he noted with relief that Wrex and Grunt’s weapons were still holstered.  
  
“This apartment is equipped with an integrated vacuum VI and robot system,” Glyph said.  “Contained within its walls are hundreds of nanobots waiting to assemble into larger forms able to perform necessary unwanted functions, such as scrubbing the toilets or, in this instance, vacuuming.”  
  
“Uh-huh,” Shepard said, as Kaidan inched around Miranda and not-quite-crawled his way behind Grunt.  “And?”  
  
“I have detected an anomaly within the vacuum VI’s programming,” Glyph said, as Kaidan stood up, still using Grunt for cover, and tried to make his way back to the kitchen.  “It appears someone has instructed it that in the event of a mess it is to form every vacuum bot possible to resolve the issue.”  
  
He made it to the end of the counter and was just about to round its corner and duck down behind it when Shepard called, “You broke the glass wall, didn’t you?”  
  
He froze.  “Technically Wrex did it,” he called back.  
  
“Heh,” Wrex said.  “Amateurs.”  
  
“Yeah, but did it _work_?” Garrus asked.  
  
“No,” Kaidan said, turning around to face the rest of the party.  “Frankly, it sucked.”  
  
“Well that’s what you get, trying to blow up a krogan,” said Zaeed from the bar as Samantha ungracefully clambered back down him.  “Go for the head plates, like I told you.”  
  
“Watch yourself,” Wrex snarled.  
  
“Shepard,” Glyph said, “I believe I have corrected the—oh dear,” he said, as without warning another swarm of vacuum bots descended upon the carnage on the bar floor.  
  
Samantha stood on the bar, empty drink in one hand, staring down at the bots with the look of someone who is _done_.  “I’m going to the hot tub,” she announced, hopping down behind the bar and disappearing for a moment, reappearing with a large bottle of unidentified alcohol in her hand.  “Everyone’s welcome to join.”  
  
“Noted,” Shepard said.  “Glyph?  Do we have anything on the playlist that doesn’t involve a saxophone?”  
  
“Let me see,” Glyph said, as Kaidan made his way through the dispersing party guests back to his wife’s side.  
  
Shepard gave him that _look_ , that side-eye look that she had, deeply suspicious and a little incredulous all at once.  “You made us an army of autonomous vacuum cleaners?”  
  
“Maybe,” he said.  “Maybe I just forgot to set it back.”  
  
She held the look for a moment more, then sighed and stepped into him, dropping her head on his chest.  “We’re serving fondue, Kaidan.  It’s one of the messiest foods in the galaxy.”  
  
“And I’m sure Glyph will get it all smoothed out,” he said, slipping his arms around her and giving her a squeeze.  “Relax, it’ll be—”  
  
“Hey,” said Grunt, from somewhere behind him and entirely too close for comfort.  “Not to bother you, but have you seen the kids?”  
  
Shepard pressed her forehead even harder into his chest as his arms tightened around her again.  “No?” he said.  
  
 “Okay, cool, just thought I’d check.  They’re bound to be around here somewhere.  Your security would let you know if they left, right?”  
  
“Sure,” Kaidan said, flipping open his omni-tool while keeping his arms around Shepard.  “Doesn’t look like—oh no.”  
  
“What?”  Shepard’s head was up and her hands were reaching for a gun that wasn’t there.  “They escape?”  
  
“No, no,” he said, walking as quickly as felt polite to the door.  “No, Jacob and Brynn have been waiting for—sorry, sorry,” he said, as the door slid open.  “We had a little—are you okay?”  
  
The two looked more or less as though they’d been run over by a Citadel shuttle on their way over.  “Sure,” Jacob said with a forced grin.  “I mean, now we are.”  
  
“I could have gone to sleep,” Brynn said, rubbing her eyes.  “I should’ve just gone to sleep.”  
  
“We’re here to have fun,” Jacob said.  “And we’re here now, so let’s have fun, yeah?”  
  
“Babysitter issues?” Shepard said as they came inside.  “Come to the kitchen, we’ve got fondue.”  
  
“As in actual cheese?” Brynn asked, and at Shepard’s nod she dashed away from the rest of them.  
  
“Never stand between a woman and her cheese,” Jacob said, and Kaidan found himself nodding vigorously in agreement.  “And not so much babysitter issues as kid issues.  As in kid not going to sleep issues.  I swear, we could put that boy in a straightjacket and he’d _still_ figure out how to get out of the crib.  Brynn wants to try, but I’ve convinced her—just as an experiment,” he protested, as Kaidan met Shepard’s gaze to find an equal alarm there.  “I wouldn’t _really_ —ah, but you’ll see soon enough.”  
  
Panic rising.  “Maybe,” Shepard said.  “Go enjoy fondue with your—speaking of kids, did Grunt ever—”  
  
He felt the floor shake a split-second before he heard the ear-splitting “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAW!” and looked up to see Eezo the varren galloping down the stairs, one of the krogan children clinging to its back, their legs flying in the air behind them.  As Eezo jumped off the last stair it _charged_ again, slamming straight into the back of one of the chairs in the living room.  The krogan lost its grip and went flying; Kaidan instinctively threw out a hand and caught it in a biotic field, gently dropping it onto the couch.  It bounced once and then stood up and started jumping.  “Again!  Again!”  
  
“Oh no you don’t,” Shepard said, sprinting for the stairs.  “Jack?   _Grunt_?”  
  
“Do I want to know?” Jacob asked, following Kaidan to the couch.  
  
“Probably not,” he answered, holding the child under its arms and staggering under the weight as he lifted it up.  Jacob saw him stumble and grabbed the kid’s legs and together they lowered the wriggling krogan to the ground.  His hands came away strangely sticky, and as he looked at its face to try to see which one it was he discovered its face was entirely covered in—  
  
“Chocolate,” he breathed.  
  
“Yum,” the kid agreed.  
  
“Oh,” he said, “no,” and then he couldn’t say anything else because several kilos’ worth of pleasantly fragrant varren rammed itself into his solar plexus and drove him to the ground, then started licking chocolate off his hands.  
  
Jacob’s face appeared in his otherwise starry field of vision.  “You okay, man?”  
  
“Ow,” he managed.  Jacob offered him a hand and he tried to reach for it, but the moment he moved his hand away from Eezo’s mouth, the varren issued such a growl as to make him rethink the decision.  “You know…I think I’m good.”  
  
“If you say so,” Jacob said.  “I’m gonna go find Brynn, make sure she didn’t get tackled.”  
  
Kaidan managed a nod and then dropped his head back to the floor, staring up at the cavernous ceiling with its soft lights and soothing wood panel— _ow_.  
  
He could barely make out the krogan child who had jumped atop Eezo’s back.  “My turn!  My turn!”  
  
“No, _mine_ ,” said the other one—and at this moment, he realized they were _both_ covered in chocolate—and then they were wrestling atop the varren who was currently atop _him_ , and he couldn’t quite summon the breath to suggest they take their battle elsewhere, so he did the first thing that came to his mind and called up his barrier.  
  
The immediate detonation that followed wasn’t terribly explosive, but it did lift everyone high enough for him to roll out from underneath them and clamber to his feet, throwing out his hands to catch them in another biotic field before they hit the ground.  Eezo seemed none too pleased, its feet frantically scraping against the field, but the krogans _heh heh heh_ ’d with delight, waving their stubby arms and shouting, “Again!  Again!”  
  
“Grunt?” Kaidan called.  “Jack?”  
  
He felt the strange static-y tremor of another biotic field joining his and risked looking away from his charges long enough to see Miranda sauntering up, a beer in one hand, the other outstretched in a similar manner to his.  “Need some help?”  
  
“Thanks,” he said.   
  
She nodded and took a sip of her beer, waving her hand a little to jiggle the field, much to the krogans’ delight.  “Did you let Jacob choose the music?” she asked.  
  
“Huh?  Yeah,” he said.   
  
“I thought so,” she said, gaze roving the room as if looking for the speakers.  “The hard drive on one of our shuttles was damaged once and we listened to this track for a month straight.”  She took another drink.  “I had hoped I’d never hear it again.”  
  
Before Kaidan could apologize, he heard the sound of the voice of the love of his life in its silkiest, most dangerous tones.  “Let me get this straight,” she said, and he looked up to see her back leaning against the railing above, arms crossed, ostensibly speaking to Jack and Grunt, but loud enough for everyone else to hear.  “You put Eezo in the hot tub.”  
  
“Like I said I would,” Jack said.  
  
“And the kids in the gym.”  
  
“Like you told me to,” Grunt said.  
  
“And then you left them there unsupervised,” Shepard said.  
  
“Well, yeah,” Grunt said.  “What was I supposed to do, stay with them the whole time?”  
  
“Note to self,” Liara murmured, appearing at Kaidan’s elbow and bouncing the krogan between a few very tiny singularities, “don’t ask Grunt to babysit.”  
  
Shepard’s corresponding sigh lingered in the air for a good ten seconds before she continued.  “And then Samantha came upstairs to use the hot tub.”  
  
“And kicked my varren out,” Jack said.  
  
“Damn straight I did,” Samantha said, standing a little apart from the other three, wrapped in a fluffy pink towel and waving some sort of back-scrubbing brush as she spoke, flinging water everywhere.  “No way was I going to have that thing in the bath with me.”  
  
“Why not?” Jack said.  “I do it all the time.”  
  
“Too much information,” Shepard said.  
  
“More like not enough,” Zaeed shouted from…somewhere, better not to wonder about it.  
  
“Anyway,” Shepard said, “so Jack, you found Eezo peeing on the houseplants—”  
  
“Gotta mark his territory somehow.”  
  
“—and told him to go pee on the rock garden—”  
  
“Thought it’d be easier to clean.”  
  
“—which is where you found Jarkat and Deg swimming in the chocolate fountain—”  
  
“Kids’ve got good taste,” Grunt said.  
  
“—which you, Garrus, were doing nothing about—”  
  
“As far as I’m concerned, it’s a non-edible substance,” Garrus said.  “Why not swim in it?  Looked like fun.”  
  
“—right,” Shepard said, the silk in her voice turning more and more to weary resignation, “James, what’s your excuse?”  
  
James, leaning against a piece of art that, well, maybe had been worth something once but was a little hideous, now that he looked at it, shrugged.  “Looked like fun.”  
  
The silence after that statement lasted a little longer still, and then Shepard continued, “At which point Eezo saw the chocolate fountain—”  
  
“Varren’s got good taste too.”  
  
“—and dove into it before you could…stop him?”  
  
“I mean,” Jack said, “I _probably_ could have stopped him.”  
  
“But?”  
  
Jack shrugged.  “Looked like fun.  Who knows, might take a dip myself.”  
  
“Don’t forget all the bedraggled bots trying to clean up all the splatters,” Garrus said.  “That was my favorite part.”  
  
“And somewhere in all this ‘looked like fun’ frolicking, they got it into their heads to… _ride_ …the varren?”  
  
“That was my idea,” Grunt said.  “Thought maybe they could all burn off some energy.”  
  
Kaidan glanced at Liara, who nodded at him, and so he dropped his part of the field and started making his way to the stairs.  
  
“And now they’re all…” Shepard looked over her shoulder and paused again.  “Floating in my living room?”  
  
“It’s fine,” Liara called up, “we can handle—”  
  
Which was the exact moment one of them reached out a grubby, chocolate-covered hand and detonated a singularity.  
  
Kaidan fell back against the wall with the fireplace—not _into_ the fire, thankfully—while Liara landed atop the piano keys with a discordant _thump_ and Miranda’s finely sculpted posterior slammed into the floor.  Eezo howled with relief; one of the krogan also slammed into the fireplace wall and stayed there, clinging to the uneven stonework, while the apparent biotic floated itself to the floor, screeched, “Krogan forever!” and immediately took off running.  
  
“Oh,” Grunt said, “yeah, Jarkat’s biotic.  Her mom mentioned that.”  
  
“You’re really making me rethink this decision to let you see her,” Wrex bellowed from the bar.  
  
“We’re fine!” Grunt bellowed back, and then he looked to Shepard and said, “Right?  We’re good?”  
  
“Grunt,” Shepard said, and meanwhile Kaidan got back to his feet and made his way to the kitchen, “there’s a _crater_ in my living room.”  
  
“So fill it with water and let the varren splash in it if that’s what he likes,” Grunt said.  
  
“Not a bad idea,” Jack said.  
  
“Not a good one, either,” Shepard said, and then Kaidan lost the thread of the conversation as he went through the kitchen, figuring he’d make a quick pass through the rest of the downstairs before rejoining his wife.  Kitchen, clear, and containing his quarry, which he retrieved before continuing on; downstairs bed and bath, obviously showing signs of previous krogan child occupation but otherwise fine; dining room, clear; and then as he tried to step to the hallway towards the office, Kal’Reegar standing in his way.  
  
“Sorry sir,” he said, “but this area’s off-limits.  No unauthorized access.”  
  
Kaidan stood nearly toe-to-toe with him, yet could only make out his own reflection in the quarian’s helmet.  “Reegar,” he said finally, “this is my _house_.”  
  
“Understood, sir,” he said.  “I have my orders from the Admiral, sir.”  
  
They stared at each other a moment more, and finally Kaidan said, “At least tell me—”  
  
“All done!” came Tali’s cheerful voice, followed a moment later by the Admiral herself rounding the corner from the office.  “Oh, hello, Kaidan.  I heard a ruckus.  What’d we miss?”  
  
He stared at her.  He could _hear_ the entirely innocent grin in her voice, but looking at her helmet got him no farther than it had with her bodyguard.  Date.  Something.  “Grunt’s a terrible babysitter,” he said at last.  
  
 “Oh,” she said, “well, I could have told you that.”  And then she slipped her arm around Kal’s and said, “Well, time to go have some fun.”  
  
“What fun?” Kaidan asked.  
  
“You heard the Admiral,” Kal said.  “Go have some fun, Major.”  
  
With that they breezed by him, and after a moment he decided to forego his plan of inspecting the office in favor of being by Shepard’s side to support her when the other shoe inevitably dropped.  He turned left and climbed the stairs, emerging on the second floor to find his beautiful bride leaning over the railing and looking down into their living room.  He hesitated for just a moment, drinking in her dark hair drifting over one shoulder, the faint traces of the new scars she’d earned, the mild resignation mixed with a fond smile on her face; and for a moment, the ground beneath him trembled and he put a hand out to the railing to steady himself.  For a moment, he remembered that he’d almost lost her, and for a moment the breath was gone from his lungs.  
  
Then he realized the ground trembling came from what sounded like a minor biotic explosion, and so he joined his wife at the railing, offering his gift.  “Bacon?”  
  
“Thanks,” she said, taking it and leaning her head against his upper arm.  “Did you ever play games like this as a kid?”  
  
He opened his mouth to ask _what games_ and then looked down to see Jarkat and Eezo apparently duking it out within a protective bubble of Samara’s making.  As he watched, each backed up to an opposite side of the sphere, dug their toes into the ground…and then Jarkat sent an incredibly unstable shockwave towards the varren, who dodged it and ran towards her, lifting her up and then slamming her down on its back.  He’d seen such a move break lesser men’s spines, but Jarkat made a crazy noise he hesitantly identified as a giggle and grabbed on, wrestling the varren back to the ground.  Deg sat on the outside edge of the sphere, alternately eating chocolate from between his toes and cheering.  
  
He closed his mouth, opened it again, waited for something to come out, and finally gave up and closed it again.  “Didn’t think so,” Shepard said.  “Did you bring beer?”  
  
He shook his head.  “Just bacon,” he said, offering another piece, which she accepted.  “How’s the chocolate fountain?”  
  
“All the fruit’s still there,” she said.  “All the chocolate’s got baby krogan in it now.”  
  
“Ah,” he said.  
  
“Did we ever find Kasumi?” she asked.  
  
The alarm that had mostly receded from his mind slowly crept back in.  “I don’t…think so?”  
  
“Great,” she said.  “Do we have downstairs neighbors?”  
  
He followed her gaze back to the living room floor, where the crater was beginning to show signs of structural weakness.  “I don’t…”  He frowned.  “I don’t know if there even _is_ a downstairs.”  
  
“So they’ll just break through to the traffic below?”  She leaned harder against him.  “I mean, they’d probably survive.”  
  
“No worries, Shep,” came a disembodied voice at her other shoulder.  “Everything’s all taken care of.”  
  
Kaidan froze but Shepard, entirely used to Kasumi’s antics, merely considered this statement as she crunched her bacon, raising her gaze to the ceiling.  “You pilfered Kaidan’s underwear drawer.”  
  
“I can neither confirm nor deny that statement,” Kasumi said with a giggle in her voice.  “Did you say you wanted a beer?”  
  
“Sure,” Shepard said, and Kasumi materialized long enough to hand over an unopened bottle and give Kaidan a Cheshire smile before disappearing again.  
  
Shepard considered the bottle for a moment before popping off the cap with the slightest biotic burst.  “I don’t know,” she said around the bottle mouth as she took her first drink, “I guess you’d look okay in a thong.”  
  
“I don’t—” Kaidan said, as a prelude to a suitable response that he would probably come up with eventually, when Glyph suddenly flew out from the bar and rose to a middling height, expanding in size as he did so.  
  
He felt Shepard tense, reaching for a pistol that wasn’t there even as he threw his barrier up from habit alone, and then Glyph said, “Yo, yo, yo, partygoers, listen up!”  
  
“Oh no,” Shepard said.  
  
“DJ GlphyRazzle is in the _house_ ,” he continued in what was basically his normal voice, though now his expanded size had also turned multicolored, like a disco ball with built-in lights.  “It is time to get our par-tay _on_!”  
  
“What on _earth_ —” Liara’s voice came, also from the general bar area, and Kaidan looked away from the drone long enough to see her opening her omni-tool and frantically typing away.  
  
“Come on,” Shepard said, downing what appeared to be half the bottle as she grabbed his hand and pulled him to the stairs.   
  
“Shepard,” Liara said, meeting them at the foot of the stairs, “I really don’t know—someone’s locked me out—”  
  
“In the name of _fun_ ,” Tali announced as she stood up from behind the bar, having apparently been in the process of attaching a festive pointy party hat of her own to the top of her helmet.  Kal stood behind her, arms crossed, a similar hat atop his own helmet; and despite the perfect poker face of his mask he exuded a combination of resignation, steel resolve, and the peculiar kind of crazy that came with being in love with a force of nature unto herself.  Kaidan sympathized.  “Now let’s _dance_!”  
  
At that moment Jacob’s smooth jazz disappeared under thumping bass and techno synth; Glyph’s new form pulsated with the music, and the lights dimmed so that the apartment appeared mostly painted in colored light.  “Tali—” Liara said.  
  
“I’ll put him back, I’ll put him back,” Tali said, patting Liara’s arm as she sauntered past, then grabbing her hand at the last minute and pulling her along with her.  “Come _on_ , relax a little!”  
  
“I—” Liara stammered, but Kal gently shoved her from behind and she stumbled after Tali.  
  
“It’ll be good for you!” Shepard called after her, and then drank a little more beer.  
  
“You all right?” Kaidan said.  
  
She looked up at him around the bottle, the light painting her face red and blue and yellow, a shifting multitude of colorful shadows that only further obscured her blank expression.  And then she set the bottle down on the bar and shrugged.  “It was inevitable, really.  And she’s right, this is more fun.”  
  
“Oh?” he asked, and she flashed a mischievous smile that made him weak at the knees.  He responded by reaching out and pulling her close, his hands at her waist.  “More fun?”  
  
She put her hands against his chest, playfully pushing away.  “Sure,” she said.  “C’mon, let’s spike the fondue—”  
  
“Already taken care of,” Jack said as she breezed towards the upstairs.  
  
“—let’s _investigate_ the fondue,” she said, looping an arm around his waist, and he allowed himself to be guided to the kitchen.  Behind them another minor biotic explosion detonated; being old soldiers, they didn’t even blink.  
  
In the kitchen Brynn was leaning on Jacob, apparently having already eaten quite a bit of spiked fondue, and Garrus was fiddling with a panel Kaidan hadn’t even know existed, and Joker and EDI were dancing.  Chakwas was primly perched on a counter, delicately licking fondue off her fingers.  Shepard’s arm was still around his waist.  There was plenty of bacon.  This was good.  
  
“Grunt,” Samara called, “I will not be able to maintain this field for much longer, so if you would perhaps consider collecting your charges—”  
  
The explosion that followed was much louder and accompanied by the sound of shattering glass and the _whoosh_ of something large being set ablaze.  
  
Shepard’s arm around his waist became a steel beam.  “I don’t want to look,” she said.  “Will you look?”  
  
“I’d rather not,” he said, reaching for bacon instead.  
  
“I wasn’t _done yet_ ,” Zaeed shouted.  
  
“Garrus?” Shepard said to the turian, who hadn’t bothered to look up from the panel.  
  
“Not my lane,” he answered.  “He was on fireplace duty.  I’m weaponizing the gym.”  
  
“You’re _what_?”  
  
“You know,” Kaidan said, “we could stress and be responsible about this—”  
  
“We’re so good at it,” Shepard agreed.  
  
“May I interject my professional opinion?” Chakwas asked between finger licks.  
  
“Any time, Doc,” Shepard said.  
  
“I suggest you enjoy yourselves, and send Grunt the bill.”  
  
Kaidan slouched a bit so that he could lean over and rest his head atop Shepard’s.  “She’s got a point.”  
  
“Really, I think we could just bill all of Clan Urdnot,” she said, stabbing a bread cube with particular force before dunking it in the fondue pot.  
  
“Sounds like a plan,” Garrus said, straightening and dusting off his hands.  “All right, we’re all set.”  
  
Shepard dropped her fondue fork and covered her face with her hands.  Kaidan rubbed her lower back with the hand that wasn’t holding the bacon.  “I love you guys,” she said, her voice somewhat muffled.  “I really, really do.”  
  
“You must,” Brynn said.  “I’d have had Jacob kill the lot of them by now.”

“It’ll be okay,” Kaidan said, retrieving her fondue fork and handing it to her.  “We’re going to get a few more drinks in us, we’re going to dance, we’re going to have a good time, and we’ll take care of it in the morning.  Deal?”  
  
She accepted the fondue fork, looking up at him with that expression that made his chest feel tight and as if it were about to burst all at once, the one that said she _needed_ him, that she, Commander Shepard, Hero of the Citadel, Savior of the Galaxy, the strength and courage of trillions of beings throughout the Milky Way—needed _him_ , and loved _him_ , with all the strength and courage and devotion she had, the look that made him helpless to do anything but love her back.  
  
“Deal,” she said, and he sealed it with a kiss.  
  
  
  
A warm, comforting darkness enveloped him, and in his ears he was vaguely aware of a familiar voice saying, “This is me waking you,” but at the edges of the voice and the more general state of wakeful consciousness he felt a miasma of pain heading his way, and so he went back to sleep.  
  
Later the urgings of his bladder made further sleep impossible, and so he stumbled his way into the bathroom and then back out again, as he found Samantha in a towel snoring on the floor.  The downstairs bathroom was similarly occupied, this time by a snoring Grunt with two immaculately clean krogan children atop him in the corner of the shower.  It was cute, but his head hurt and he _really_ had to pee, so after a moment of wrestling with his options he went back upstairs and very carefully lifted Samantha and put her in the bed.  After a further moment’s reflection he covered her with another blanket, and then went about his business.  
  
The second time he went downstairs he discovered the lingering scent of bacon upon the air, and he had to go back upstairs for a moment to make sure he didn’t need to throw up.  While there, standing over the sink and staring into the mirror, he remembered that they had a fully stocked medicine cabinet and, upon opening it, discovered that someone (Chakwas, no doubt) had thoughtfully supplied it with an extra pack of anti-hangover meds.  He downed a couple, went ahead and brushed his teeth, thought about putting on a clean shirt, went to the dresser only to find a bouquet made of all of his clothing artfully arranged in a vase that definitely hadn’t been there yesterday, gave up, and finally went back downstairs, looking for his wife.  
  
He found her sitting in the middle of the crater in their living room, now less a crater and more merely a divot in the general wasteland that was the living room floor.  Her legs were crossed and her hands were on her knees in a position he thought he recognized from Samara; her eyes were closed, and as he got closer he could hear her humming.  One sad, solitary vacuum bot, the lone survivor of the previous night’s carnage, traversed the floor around her, occasionally running into one of her knees and beeping forlornly.  He made a mental note to add the cost of the nanobot system to the Urdnot bill.  
  
He sat across from her and mirrored her pose; she opened one eye.  “Look who’s finally awake,” she said.  
  
“Good morning,” he said.  “I didn’t know you meditated.”  
  
“I don’t,” she said, with a slight crease between her eyebrows.  “More like I was just trying to commune with the floor.”  
  
He squinted at her.  “Did you just keep drinking when you woke up or…?”  
  
“Nah,” she said.  “Just thought I’d made sure they didn’t, I don’t know, accidentally open a wormhole to another galaxy or something.”  
  
“I see,” he said.  “Good idea.”  She gave him a skeptical look, and he managed to keep a straight face for another second or two before cracking into a grin.  “Hey,” he said, “weirder things have happened to us.”  
  
“They definitely have,” she said, her eyes losing focus, and for a moment he worried she was going back to bad memories, to the places where the darkness threatened to swallow her whole, and then she said, “You should’ve seen Zaeed before he left.”  
  
“Oh?” he asked.  
  
“Cussing a blue streak over some tattoo Jack gave him while he was passed out on the hearth.  Which, speaking of,” she said, glancing to her left, “we should probably, uh, replace some of that.”  
  
He glanced over long enough to see—well, enough—and then returned his attention to her infinitely more appealing face.  “Add it to the bill,” he said.  
  
“Already done,” she said, and then she closed her eyes and rubbed her eyes and sighed.  “We sure do throw one hell of a party,” she said.  
  
“Sure do,” he agreed, unable to keep a smile from his face.  “Hey.”  
  
“Next time, no babysitting,” she said, and then she dropped her hands and met his gaze.  “Hey what?”  
  
He gave her his best grin, the one that he hoped conveyed how delighted he felt whenever he saw her, and said, “Glad we’re married.”  
  
Her lip curved in a half-smile.  “Yeah,” she said.  “Me too.”   
  
He reached out a hand and she caught it and for a moment they sat smiling at each other as the fake dawn streamed through the windows, the light catching on their rings, and then from somewhere behind him James yelled, “Hey, Shepard!  You got any eggs or what?”  
  
She sighed.  “Work’s never over.”  
  
“You’d be bored if it was,” he said, squeezing her hand and then dropping it in preparation to get to his feet.  
  
“True,” she conceded, and then as he stood she reached out and caught his hand again.  “But hey.”  
  
“Yeah?” he said.  
  
She looked up at him and he couldn’t help but tug her to her feet, tug her _off_ her feet, catch her against him and drop a kiss on the top of her head.  “Hey,” she said again, teasing this time, resting her chin on his chest as she met his gaze.  
  
“Yeah?” he said, grinning at her, ducking his head for another kiss.  
  
She gave it willingly, gladly, and just as he started to pull away she said, “Wouldn’t want to be doing it with anyone else.”  
  
“Yeah,” he said against the curve of her smile, pulling her close, steadily ignoring James’s calls of _get a room_ , barely managing to get his final words in before her lips became the only thing that mattered, “me too.”


End file.
